Psychoanalysis of Evil: Perspectives on Destructive Behavior

By Henry Kellerman

For all our knowledge of psychopathology and sociopathology--and despite endless examinations of abuse and torture, mass murder and genocide--we still don't have a real handle on why evil exists, where it derives from, or why it is so ubiquitous.

A compelling synthesis of diverse schools of thought, Psychoanalysis of Evil identifies the mental infrastructure of evil and deciphers its path from vile intent to malignant deeds. Evil is defined as manufactured in the psyche: the acting out of repressed wishes stemming from a toxic mix of harmful early experiences such as abuse and neglect, profound anger, negative personality factors, and mechanisms such as projection. This analysis brings startling clarity to seemingly familiar territory, that is, persons and events widely perceived as evil. Strongly implied in this far-reaching understanding is a call for more accurate forms of intervention and prevention as the author:

• Reviews representations of evil from theological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic sources.
• Locates the construction of evil in psychodynamic aspects of the psyche.
• Translates vague abstractions of evil into recognizable concepts.
• Exemplifies this theory with the lives and atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.
• Applies psychoanalytic perspective to the genocides in Turkey, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Rwanda.
• Revisits Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil."

Psychoanalysis of Evil holds a unique position in the literature and will gather considerable interest among readers in social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and political anthropology. Historians of mass conflict should find it instructive as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jul 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9783319073927

Book preview

Part I

The Garden

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Henry KellermanPsychoanalysis of EvilSpringerBriefs in Psychology10.1007/978-3-319-07392-7_1

1. Entering the Domain of Evil

Henry Kellerman¹  

(1)

The Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society, Inc., New York, NY, USA

Henry Kellerman

Email: [e-mail]

Introduction

Is Good Always Good and Never Evil?

Hedonism: On the Philosophy of Pleasure

The Essence

Keywords

PleasureGood and evil Wish SymptomFairnessDemonGenocideNaziDouble-selfActing-outNarcissismParadiseHedonismSerpentSuperegoInfrastructure of evil

Introduction

In examining evil from a philosophical vantage point, Taylor (2000), in his book Good and Evil , first considers what is traditionally among philosophers considered to be good. In this way, Taylor approaches the issue of evil essentially by the process of identifying basic elements of good, that is, Taylor states that philosophical conceptions of what is good specifically include the consideration of virtue, pleasure , and happiness (p. 19). He means that we need to understand virtue, pleasure, and happiness to get to the true meaning of what good means. As a specific start, the Greeks identified good, with well-being.

To start off then, pleasure and virtue are surprisingly not at all necessarily in lockstep or inevitably reciprocal and, in addition, perhaps more surprisingly, pleasure and virtue are not entirely, absolutely, or even necessarily always considered to be good. The Greeks even added a qualifier to this conflation of nouns (pleasure and virtue) by considering that being good ultimately relates to being efficient especially with respect to function. The idea of efficiency and function in such thinking concerns the satisfaction of goals. Taylor then joins it all by indicating that these early Greek thinkers (in the time of Socrates) correlated the satisfaction of goals, with the adjective good. Such an alignment means that goal satisfaction is a synonym for the gratified wish.

Of course it is obvious that obtaining pleasure by satisfying the wish (the goal) is at times not at all correlated to virtue. As a matter of fact, gratified wishes probably are as much negatively correlated to virtue as they are possibly positively correlated. This brings us to an important notion of contemporary language usage in the formulation of psychopathological concepts. For example, in psychoanalytic thinking, goals and ends along with satisfaction are typically assessed, as hinted, with respect to the person’s wish, that is, getting one’s goal met, or satisfying ends is really another way of referring to a principle of the psyche that in itself has far-reaching implications. This principle of the psyche, first proposed by Freud (1926), is also explored in many publications including in several of my publications (Kellerman 2007; 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2014). It is a principle that translates goals and ends to this rather central idea of wishes.

Since we are all wish-soaked creatures, the idea is that the pleasure principle (the mother of the wish) captures our undivided attention. It is the pleasure principle represented by the wish that conflates the idea of efficiency, goals, and ends discussed in the tradition of language usage as for example among early Greek philosophers. Then, again, as an encrypted code (particularly operationalized in a person’s psyche), the ideas of efficiency, goals, and ends are rendered mostly by psychoanalysts as encrypted messages translated into the pleasure principle’s chief derivative representative: that of the wish.

What Freud proposed was that although in life wishes are frequently thwarted or unrequited, nevertheless:

In the psyche, no wish will ever be denied.

In the psyche, wishes always prevail. However, the trick of the psyche is that such wishes prevail in disguise, in the form of psychological/emotional symptoms that come to represent each wish. Therefore, in the psyche, wishes become expressed symbolically as symptoms—as

psychological/emotional symptoms . This is why Freud proclaimed that this sort of symbolic representation of the wish-as-symptom is correspondingly why we all love our symptoms—even those that are painful—because the symptom represents our wish fully gratified, albeit in symbolic form.

In addition, the Greeks associated goodness with rationality and considered virtue and rationality also to be intimately connected. Nevertheless, and perhaps even not so surprisingly, it seems quite clear in the light of historical hindsight that such a correlation of virtue and rationality is not at all rational, that is, that things can be done with rather perfect rational acuity, and yet these rational things can still be of a negative or nefarious nature, and not at all virtuous. It is not simply that vice is the corruption of reason. There are times when the corruption of reason is also exemplified in an evil attempt to rescue the so-called civil social fabric. This can be seen in the highly rational strategies in all sorts of genocides where certainly it would have been a good thing for any nefarious strategic genocidal reason and rationality to be overturned—to have that genocide be completely contaminated in order to end the genocide.

Therefore, is good always good and never evil?

Is Good Always Good and Never Evil?

Taylor also cites Socrates insofar as Socrates claimed that if one knows good then that person can never choose evil (p. 76). On the face of it, such a statement seems noble and even correct. Yet, the statement seems clearly not sufficiently scrutinized by Socrates. The point is that it depends on who it is that is proclaiming the goodness. From a perpetrator’s genocidal point of view, the victim-target is an entirely justified target, that is, to eliminate the one judged to be subhuman is considered good by the accuser or by the accuser’s group and yet we see that in this ­particular example, good and evil can be one and the same—just as Paradise and the Serpent are also apparently one and the same—hinging on whether one’s wish is gratified or thwarted. Even then, it depends on whether the wish is reflective of the aggressor’s wish or of the wish of the victim. If the aggressor/oppressor’s wish is gratified, it would simply mean that the Serpent triumphs in Paradise. If the victim (the one who is discriminated against) prevails, then Paradise remains pure and the Serpent is nullified.

Socrates apparently felt that no one ever voluntarily chooses evil (Taylor 2000, p. 77). In the contemporary literature of social theory—especially for example, in the social psychiatric literature, Robert J. Lifton (1979), in his towering study of the underpinnings of evil (The Broken Connection)—analyzes in detail this entire issue of the vicissitudes of good and evil, Liften enlarges the issue by introducing the idea of death imagery. This entire analysis by Lifton leads to a more elaborate understanding of Socrates’s pronouncement that no one ever voluntarily chooses evil.

Again, of course, it seems that Socrates was not quite on his game with the proposition that no one ever chooses evil. This is seemingly a naïve yet hopeful peroration on the issue of evil. For example, I have pointed out elsewhere (Kellerman 2013), that Dennis Rader, who was for 30 years a member of the Christ Lutheran Church, serving as President of its Congressional Council, took pleasure in strangling women to death while simultaneously participating in sustained devotional supplication at his church (p. 29). Rader knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what good meant and yet he chose evil (while also knowing what evil meant). He knew what he was doing was wrong, immoral, cruel, sadistic, and monstrous, and yet he infused all of it within what he chose he wanted (wished). He wished for pleasure so then pleasure triumphed over any other consideration. In this sense, Dennis Rader voluntarily knowing (or conscious of what he was doing and what he wanted), seems—no matter how one turns it—to have chosen evil in the face of knowing the difference between good and bad!

Rader’s compulsion to strangle women while knowing it was an impossible wrongness, did not at all prevent him from doing it. In this sense, we can say that awareness of his strangling compulsion did not neutralize the decision to follow through on the evil act. Rader could have sought various ways to control it all—whether through psychotherapy, or especially medication, or through a decision to enlist church assistance and so forth, or in a combination of all of these. However, and apparently, what he knew was not as compelling as what he felt. His wish was consistently triumphant over his knowing. The best one can say about this idea of no one ever voluntarily choosing evil is that in some cases, the monstrous act is one of involuntary voluntarism—the choice determined by powerful ­psychological forces that are always arranged in the psyche in the form of the wish. As proclaimed earlier, it is the wish as the chief representative of the pleasure principle that triumphs. And to the person who acts on such impulse, compulsion, and desire, the evil act itself is of course and without a doubt in such a self-same person’s contaminated and pathological psyche, considered to generate a feel-good circumstance and certainly a feel-good experience.

Therefore, the democratic assumption (and impulse) is to pridefully state that one has a choice as to whether to do the righteous thing or not, that is, in the active sense, not to hurt others or at the other end, in the passive sense, not to exploit or manipulate others. Yet, with all the persuasive forces exerting their abundant power and influence, the issue of choice can be a very complicated concept indeed. It takes a resilient ego, a warm historical family structure, personal courage, and so forth to make it possible for any person to resist mass pressure to conform or even to resist the invitation to support apparent or unmistakable tyranny. It would be naïve to think otherwise. And yes, the presence of sufficient empathy and compassion in the personality is very definitely essential not only to choice-making, but instead, rather to correct any potential evil choice-making (Baron-Cohen 2013; Bloom 2011).

In this sense, good can sometimes be good and sometimes be evil depending on the rationale one gives oneself in concert with all sorts of other variables—some of which include ideological persuasions, psychological forces, and even in the sense of being obviously co-opted by others. In fact frequently, the sense of righteous indignation can become (and usually does become) the assumption driving evil (wrong) acts; this, notwithstanding the truth that righteous indignation also is often based upon one’s sense of the violation of fair play. In addition, ideology can have hypnotic effects. Ideology can even synthetically offer individuals and/or groups an opportunity to generate new wishes and then finally to give to these newer wishes the reward of perfect gratification. This can be so even though the ultimate gratification of this wish (or wishes) may inevitably end in harm to another, or in larger sociological terms, end in harm to masses of others.

Of course people are also persuaded to believe in demons , or in the demon, and when propagandized to believe that certain subgroups of people represent this demon , then it becomes possible to perform heinous evil crimes against such a targeted other group. As a matter of fact, the predator group can even obtain gratification because those considered as the evil ones (who are denoted as demon possessed) are correspondingly considered to be thankfully reduced in numbers as they are murdered.

In a related discussion but somewhat digressively, Socrates states that people who cause deleterious ends are acting from ignorance, and that usually these people are not very happy. However, in this proposition, again, it seems that Socrates is not fully appreciating the issue of the power of suggestion with respect to how people can behave, and that such people can be as happy as others because good or bad, if they attain satisfaction of the wish, then this sort of satisfaction equates, at least somewhat with happiness. And like all happiness (as a result of good or bad behavior), such happiness needs to be consistently reinforced.

Therefore, the cluster of variables including ideological persuasions, psychological forces such as a rather high suggestibility-quotient, and especially ­ideological group affiliation, lends credence to the eighteenth century pronouncement by Voltaire who famously said:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

This implies that the wish can be intrinsic to the person, or then again, in the absence of such indigenous wishes, faux wishes can be imposed through suggestion, persuasion, peer-pressure, and identification with authoritarian iconic figures. The so-called romance with authoritarian iconic figures and its effect on what people will do to others on the basis of such identification or affiliation was detailed in mid-twentieth century studies by Adorno et al. (1950). In addition, in a work on The Genocidal Mind edited by Klein et al. (2005), these authors cite many studies illustrating the point that rational individuals were frequently the instrumentalists and leaders in the forefront of genocidal activity. This point is again also scrutinized by Robert J. Lifton in his study of Nazi doctors (1986).

Lifton posits the double self or psychic doubling (p. 418). The double self becomes a precept reminiscent of the psychological defense of splitting in which good experiences are separated (compartmentalized) from anxiety-provoking bad ones. Splitting enables a person to idealize one object while demonizing another. The proposition can be made that well-educated Nazi doctors were psychologically controlled by such mechanisms enabling them to commit atrocities. The theory is that such doubling or splitting also neutralizes empathy.

Aragno (2013, p. 103), reflects on the evil inherent in the Black and Satanic Masses where free rein was given to depraved priests who reveled in sexual abuse, torture, and human sacrifice . Further, Aragno also reports that this decline into ­demonology and the belief in demonic possession ….confused astronomy, philosophy, and cosmology with sorcery, alchemy and astrology…. All of it was a refutation of knowledge in order to control the populace so that only the literal reading of scripture was permitted. Aragno also sees that compliance, as she states, was beyond even the contrast between good and evil. The only important objective was to establish what the rules were for the appearance of cardinal sins in relation to raw evil. Of course, heresy, as Aragno states, became the new cardinal sin (p. 104).

Aragno goes further and cites Shakespeare’s Macbeth that she says encapsulates the grip on popular belief that powerful supernatural forces may overcome moral judgment (p. 104). Therefore, the eternal challenging question is asked: Are there evil people, or do people do evil things; are we bad or mad? The answer to Aragno’s challenge is that people indeed do evil things—especially with the rationale that it is all in the service of gratifying one’s so-called philosophy of life, a philosophy that always, but always, justifies the wish. It is an issue of the ends justifying the means, or that anything goes as long as it accomplishes your aim (your wish).

Further, our prideful democratic belief—actually an assumption—claims that decisions or choices we make are usually objective, and therefore that we have complete conscious control over such choices. However, as cited earlier, in view of certain psychoanalytic precepts (such as the definition of acting-out) , we can see that our decisions and choices can be definitely compromised (in the absence of even knowing or realizing it). This is particularly true in circumstances that we perceive to be distasteful, so that in order to truly make objective choices, one necessarily would need to be sufficiently introspective and ego-strong. It requires strength to face up to one’s shortcomings, dissatisfactions, and defeats of life without needing to conceal it all by invoking compensatory fantasies, beliefs, and behaviors. This sort of courage to face up to things is, in the present state of human evolution, seemingly quite underdeveloped, and actually rather thin. Not having the necessary resilience or courage will result in an incapacity in great masses of people to having limited understanding, or not at all understanding various phenomena of personality that need to or that should be understood. The question becomes: What are these phenomena that need to be understood? The highly probable answer concerns various psychological precepts including the psychological defense of repression . As it turns out, repression is a crucial variable with respect to one’s ability to know. Repression is an avoidance—an avowed avoidance—and becomes the foundation of the psychoanalytic definition of acting-out —to